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﻿﻿Every day 149 million Americans (almost half of the U.S. population) take at least one prescription medication – with many taking more than one - and that does not even include the number of supplements/vitamins taken. At the same time, approximately three out of four adults in the U.S. report not adhering to physician prescribed treatment regimens in one or more ways and almost half of adults report forgetting to take prescribed medication. This means worse healthcare overall and leads to anywhere from $100 to $300 billion in cost to the system – we think a sufficiently large and hard problem.

This is why today I’m thrilled to announce our investment in Mango Health – an entirely new mobile solution for managing healthcare. The team at Mango Health is trying to help consumers take control of their health with fun, elegant and easy to use mobile applications. They’re attacking the problem of managing healthcare by focusing first on the drug adherence market with a simple and elegant mobile app that will incentivize users to take their medication on time, everyday, while also warning them about potential harmful interactions, thereby increasing their safety.

When we first met the team back in January, the first thing that impressed us about Jason Oberfest and Gerald Cheong was their passion for utilizingatheir social gaming background to make mobile healthcare more accessible and fun. Before starting up, Jason served as a VP of Social Applications at ngmoco and SVP of Business Development at MySpace. Gerald was the Lead Engineer at ngmoco, and has previous experience at VM Ware, Ariba and Microsoft Research.

Over the past year, we’ve continued to see incredible opportunities in healthcare that are fundamentally driven by both ubiquitous smartphone use, as well as a trend in consumers continued desire to be more active in their healthcare – and I can’t wait to share a few more investments in the coming weeks. In addition, we’re starting to see the next generation of healthcare companies that can move at startup speed without the traditional multi-year build cycles that have been historically tied to anything in healthcare IT.

Please join me in welcoming Mango Health to the First Round Capital Portfolio and Community.